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Insiders and Outsiders in International Development1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

David A. Crocker
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Abstract

International development ethics is moral reflection on the ends and means of societal and global change. Who should engage in this activity and how should it be done? Should only citizens of a given nation reflect on, and morally evaluate, that country's development goals and strategies? Or do foreigners have a contribution to make as well? Crocker answers these questions by first briefly discussing and critiquing the context within which these questions are frequently debated, namely the ethnocentrism/anti-ethnocentrism and particularism/universalism controversies. He explains the distinction between social insiders and outsiders arguing that in development ethics there are advantages and disadvantages to being both. He urges development ethicists to cultivate a mixture of insider/outsider perspectives, beginning and ending in their own groups, but learning from and benefitting others in the process. Crocker concludes that international and regional progress are closely interrelated. Universalists and ethnocentrists must converge to “think and act globally, regionally, nationally, and locally.”

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 5 , March 1991 , pp. 149 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1991

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References

2 For the nature, tasks, and methods of international development ethics, see David A. Crocker, “Hacia una ética del desarrollo,”Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, Vol. 25, No. 62 (December 1987), pp. 129–41; “La naturaleza y la práctica de una ética del desarrollo,”Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, Vol. 26, No. 63–64 (December 1988), pp. 49–56; “Toward Development Ethics,”World Development, forthcoming; “Cuatro modelos de desarrollo costarricense: Un analisis y evaluacitm etica,”Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica, Vol. 27, No. 66 (1989), pp. 317–32; “The Hope for Just, Participatory Ecodevelopment in Costa Rica,” in J. Ronald Engel and Joan Gibb Engel, eds., Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge and International Response (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), pp. 150–63; Denis Goulet, “Tasks and Methods in Development Ethics,”Cross Currents, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1988), pp. 146–64, 172.

3 One finds many examples of foreigners evaluating another nation's practices and norms. Constantino Láscaris, a Spanish philosopher, wrote El Costarricense, 5th ed. (San José, Costa Rica: Educa, 1985), an important study of Costa Rican identity. The U.S. development ethicist Denis Goulet has evaluated development strategies in several countries, most recently those of Mexico. See Denis Goulet and Kwan S. Kim, Estrate'gias de Desarrollo Para el Futuro de Mexico (Guadalajara: ITESCO, 1989). Jerome M. Segal, a U.S. philosopher, offers moral and prudential arguments for a “two state” solution to the Middle-Eastern conflict. As a Jew, Segal is an outsider in relation to the PLO; as a U.S. Jew and an advocate of a Palestinian state, Segal is an outsider in relation to Israel. See Segal, Creating the Palestinian State: A Strategy for Peace (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1989). V.S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad of Hindu parents, is only the most recent of a series of foreigners who have analyzed and evaluated U.S. life and institutions. See Naipaul's A Turn in the South (New York: Knopf, 1989). Other foreign commentators on the United States include two important European writers: the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, J.P. Mayer, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969); and the Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York and London: Harper, 1944).

4 Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Vol. I (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 1976), p. 781.

5 Ofelia Schutte, “Overcoming Ethnocentrism in the Philosophy Classroom,”Teaching Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2 (April 1985), pp. 139–40.

6 See Howard J. Wiarda, “Toward a Nonethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative Conceptions from the Third World,” in Charles K. Wilber, ed., The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 59–82.

7 In 1895 in his “Atlanta Exposition Address,” Booker T. Washington employed this metaphor to enjoin blacks to take advantage of economic and other opportunities in the U.S. South and to urge whites to have confidence in the economic productivity and loyalty of the South's blacks. See Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1978). H. Odera Oruka, a Kenyan philosopher, gives the metaphor a particularist spin as he applauds a recent book by Johnny Washington, a black U.S. philosopher (H. Odera Oruka, “Forword,” in Johnny Washington, Alain Locke and Philosophy: A Quest for Cultural Pluralism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. xiii.

8 Ofelia Schutte, “Notes on the Issue of Cultural Imperialism,”Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 59, No. 5 (June 1986), pp. 758–59. For an important statement of Latin American particularism, see Leopoldo Zea, “Identity: A Latin American Philosophical Problem,”Philosophical Forum, Vol. 20, Nos. 1–2 (1988–89), pp. 33–42.

9 Ibid., p. 759.

10 See, for example, Risiri Frondisi, “Is There an Ibero-American Philosophy?”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 9 (1948–49), pp. 345–55; Onora O'Neill, “Ethical Reasoning and Ideological Pluralism,”Ethics, Vol. 98, No.4 (July 1988), pp. 705–22.

11 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 166. Rorty has called himself both an “ethnocentrist” and an “anti anti-ethnocentrist.” In my view Rorty has either misdescribed himself, employs a different concept, or is inconsistent. For, as we shall see, Rorty recognizes—at least in his article on Roberto Unger—the way in which cross-cultural dialogue can result in the modification and even abandonment of the norms with which one starts. See Richard Rorty, “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future,”Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 82, No. 2 (1988), pp. 335–51; “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 12–13; “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,”Michigan Quartely Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 1986), pp. 525–34. Compare with Clifford Geertz, “Anti Anti_Relativism,” reprinted in Krausz, ed., Relativism, pp. 12–34; “The Uses of Diversity,”Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1986), pp. 105–23.

12 For a description of “human life by the metaphor of acontinual reweaving of a web of beliefs and desires,” see Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” p. 531.

13 Compare with Rorty's definition of a societal member: “To be part of a society is, in the relevant sense, to be taken as a possible conversational partner by those who shape that society's self-image” (“On Ethnocentrism,” p. 529). The emphasis on “subjective” states should not be taken to exclude “objective” structures or public realities such as inherited vocabularies or “canonical texts,” for a person's intentional states may be shaped by or have these realities as objects. Alasdair Maclntyre emphasizes the role of “canonical texts” such as the Bible or Don Quixote in defining a social identity; see Maclntyre, “Relativism, Power, and Philosophy,” reprinted in Krausz, ed., Relativism, pp. 182–204.

14 Ruth Hubbard and Margaret Randall, The Shape of Red: Outsider/Insider Reflections (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1988), p. 12.

15 Ibid, p. 26.

16 Ibid., p. 26.

17 Ibid., p. 22.

18 Clifford Geertz uses these metaphors descriptively in, “The Uses of Diversity,”Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter 1986), p. 121. Rorty employs the metaphors normatively: “We can urge the construction of a world order whose model is a bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs” (“On Ethnocentrism,” p. 533).

19 Quoted in Gerald Marzorati, “Salman Rushdie: Fiction's Embattled Infidel, “New York Times Magazine, January 29, 1989, pp. 27,44.

20 MacIntyre, “Relativism,” p. 201.

21 Jean.-Paul Stire, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 58.

22 Rodolfo Stavenhagen reminded me of this important point.

23 Hubbard and Randall, The Shape of Red, p. 17.

24 See J. Baird Callicott, “Toward an Environmental Ethic,” in Tom Regan, ed., Matters of Life and Death, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 381–424, esp. pp. 403–17.

25 Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, “Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions,” in Krausz, ed., Relativism, p. 310. See also, Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. Part III; “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,”Mid-West Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 13 (1988), pp. 32–53; “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203–52.

26 Rorty, “Unger,” p. 343.

27 Nussbaum and Sen, “Internal Criticism,” p. 308.

28 I use “center” to include the industrialized northern nations as well as Third World national or provincial capitals. Similarly, “peripheries” include “developing” nations as well as areas —especially rural areas— remote from Third World capitals, whether national or provincial. I assume that “center/periphery” is more than a merely economic distinction and can be characterized as a relation of unequal power as well as unequal resource flows. The center dominates the periphery, and the periphery is dependent on the center.

29 In his pronouncements, if not in his actual practice, Enrique Dussel, the Argentinean “philosopher of liberation,” veers close to this geographical genetic fallacy: any idea originating from the North is thereby both incorrect and a tool of Northern domination of the South. This tendency in Dussel is sharply criticized by his fellow countryman Horacio Cerutti Guldberg in Filosofía de la liberation latinoamericana (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983).

30 See Schutte, “Notes on the Issue of Cultural Imperialism,” and Zea, “Identity: A Latin American Philosophical Problem.”

31 Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 129.

32 Rorty, Consequences, p. xxxvii.

33 Láscaris, El Costarricense, pp. 65–74.

34 See Goulet and Kim, Estratégias de Desarrollo, chaps. I-III.

35 See Ibid., chaps. IV, V. See also, David Barkin, Distorted Development: Mexico in the World Economy (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1990). For similar efforts in relation to Costa Rican development, see Crocker, “Cuatro Modelos”; “The Hope for Just, Participatory Ecodevelopment”; Sheldon Annis, “Debt and Wrong-Way Resource Flows in Costa Rica,”Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 4 (1990), pp. 107–21.

36 Nussbaum and Sen, “Internal Criticism,” esp. pp. 317–21.

37 Clifford Geertz emphasizes this in “Outsider Knowledge and Insider Criticism: What Can We Do for One Another?” (An unpublished response to Nussbaum and Sen, “Internal Criticism.”)

38 Elaine Sciolino, “Costa Rican Hails Bush's Latin Policy,”The New York Times, April 5, 1989, p. 3A.

39 Richard Rorty, Consequences, p. xxxvii.

40 Roberto Unger, Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

41 Rorty, “Unger,” p. 337.

42 Rorty, “Unger,” pp. 340, 351.

43 Early in 1989, Alan Riding gave a very pessimistic reading of the Brazilian case: “Over the last five years, as a vast array of long-hidden social, economic and political problems have burst to the surface, Brazilians have been forced to come to terms with a country stripped of the myths that long sustained their faith in the future…. Many Brazilians—rich and poor—simply say they wish to leave the country.” (“As Brazilian Election Nears, Magic of Democracy Wanes,”The New York Times, March 21,1989, p. 1).

44 Ariel Dorfman, “Into Another Jungle: The Final Journey of the Matacos?”Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter-American Foundation, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1988), pp. 2–15.

45 See Paula Palmer, “What Happen”: A Folk-History of Costa Rica's Talamanca Coast (San Jose, Costa Rica: Ecodesarrollos, 1977). For an important Latin American study that appreciatively evaluates Palmer's work, see Ariel Dorfman, “Bread and Burnt Rice: Culture and Economic Survival in Latin America,”Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter-American Foundation, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1984), pp. 3–5.

46 Schutte, “Overcoming Ethnocentrism,” p. 143

47 Bimal Krishna Matilal, “Ethical Relativism and Confrontation of Cultures,” in Krausz, ed., Relativism, p. 358.

48 See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

49 Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 12–13. We “Alexandrian” ethicists must guard against the temptation of believing that it is only the “exemplary instability” of the Third World (and of, at long last, the Second World) that permits an activist and socially responsible role for ethics. The “cut and dried” First World, too, has a need to be “rejuvenated.”

50 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1985), pp. 223–51; and “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,”Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 7 (1987), pp. 1–25. For the possibility of a “partial convergence … through proper confrontation and clash between culture[s], a convergence not necessarily of local moral norms, but… of basic ethical norms,” see Matilal, “Ethical Relativism,” p. 358. See also Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Affairs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Terry Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Donaldson, Thomas, “Moral Minimums for Multinationals,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 3 (1989), pp. 163–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy”; Amartya Sen, Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); David Braybrooke, “Meeting Needs: Toward a New Needs-Based Ethic”; David A. Crocker, “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen's Development Ethic”; James W. Nickel, “Rights and Development”; and G. Peter Penz, “The Priority of Basic Needs: Toward a Consensus in Development Ethics for Political Engagement.” The last four papers were presented at the IDEA Montclair Workshop, entitled “Ethical Principles for Development: Needs, Capabilities, or Rights?” Montclair State College, January 24–27, 1991. The Workshop was sponsored by the Institute for Critical Thinking of Montclair State College and the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA).